here's my suggestion. Read the thread.
dumbass LCC bike lane on Stratford High Street
- Thread starter dellzeqq
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Fab Foodie
hanging-on in quiet desperation ...
- Location
- Kirton, Devon.
Can I just add that here in Boxmeer and surrounding area today I've seen some miles and miles of very lovely segregated cycle lanes with smooth tarmac and no debris?
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Yes. It's bizarre that fewer people are getting to work by car/van/motorbike in Hackney than by bike, and yet *still* the presumption is that bike infrastructure is only allowed to eat into room allocated to pedestrians. Bikes aren't a minority road vehicle pleading for special treatment in Inner London - if anything it's Taxis and private motor vehicles that are the pandered minority. Have a look at these figures: http://www.racfoundation.org/assets...es/car-and-the-commute-data-tables-london.pdf2869123 said:
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Yes, that's kind of the point.
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
To be fair the Netherlands is quite a different proposition from Belgium.
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Really it isn\t the size of the city but the median distances travelled that makes the relevant comparison. And there London doesn't appear an outlier in the direction of vastness - on the contrary, the low average speeds mean that the actual distances covered are as small as or smaller than Dutch cities. For journeys on the road, I mean.
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
I don't think that I assume either of those things.2869880 said:
To conciiliate somewhat having done my duty to Talc and read through the thread *carefully* beyond my initial skim reading, I do think that serious and fair points have been made in critique of the LCC. In particular, failure to capitalise on and push further the distinctive approach of Hackney around permeability. This is filtered permeability approach is actually related to the Go Dutch agenda - it was first used in this way in the De Pijp area of Amsterdam. But I think that LCC have allowed themselves to become somewhat focused on CycleSuperhighways. And you are right, part of that focus is to do with the odd measure of value: cost. On the other hand a significant element of that focus is: News. CycleSuperhighways are where News is, which means that they are where the debate is, which means that they are where campaigning organisations have chance to make impact. And yes, that can skew attention from equally or more worthwhile approaches like that variant of segregation and permeability that's doing so well in Hackney. But it's not as if LCC aren't pushing for local routes and one-way motor streets with cycle contraflows, is it?
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srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
You what? You do know London? A typical central London journey - let's say from Marylebone to the City - would take you from Amsterdam city centre right the way to open country. The average commute for London residents is 7.5 miles. A 7.5 mile commute is almost impossible for an Amsterdam resident. (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...nd_business_travel_factsheet___April_2011.pdf)
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Well, as afar as doing the knowledge is concerned I can offer stats just as well as you:
http://aseasyasridingabike.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/bsrwkk8ciae52r0-l...
http://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/does-size-matter/
"67% of all car journeys by Londoners are under 5km (3 miles). Despite London’s size, car trips remain, for the most part, very short. Again, these are trips of a length that can – and undoubtedly should – be cycled, or walked, if conditions are attractive." - that' a Londoner speaking. And me myself I? I attempted to live in london in the 90's, and couldn't afford it. I used to walk fairly large distances, from Camberwell to Bloomsbury, just to save on Bus Fare. I attempted to cycle it, but even as a fairly experienced vehicular cyclist in the CTC mold I was scared shitless and gave up. More recently, I've found that conditions have vastly improved, whether due to segregated provision in some parts of Camden or just the sheer weight of numbers altering driver behaviour. So now my regular long distance trip involves transiting london on a bike between the railway stations, and I have also done the journey through london loaded up without train assistance. To be fair, faults though they may have, I don't think this would be possible without the various borough branches of the LCC. Camden in particular is much improved, and lots of Westminster is, in the technical vernacular, s***e. Just my experience - hence my interest and questions. Pleased to meet you all. --
— 'Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded.' --Flann O'Brien
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srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
3 miles is most of the way from the centre of Amsterdam to the countryside. And that's the typical London car journey. It would get you roughly across a single outer London borough.
Al Qaeda, Transport for London, Ken Livingstone, the Inland Revenue and Boris Johnson have all individually done much more for cycling in London than the collective might of the LCC or the councils. The segregated bits in Camden are severely under-built for the volumes they carry, and extremely ill designed (speaking as someone who daily negotiates with lorries crossing the cycle path).
Central London has always been a haven for cycling - traffic lights and wide roads make for clear sightlines and slow traffic. Add the congestion charge and bomb-dodgers and you've got fertility.
Al Qaeda, Transport for London, Ken Livingstone, the Inland Revenue and Boris Johnson have all individually done much more for cycling in London than the collective might of the LCC or the councils. The segregated bits in Camden are severely under-built for the volumes they carry, and extremely ill designed (speaking as someone who daily negotiates with lorries crossing the cycle path).
Central London has always been a haven for cycling - traffic lights and wide roads make for clear sightlines and slow traffic. Add the congestion charge and bomb-dodgers and you've got fertility.
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
I agree that the segregated bits of camden are significantly under-built for the volumes that they carry. Is this perhaps because they are victims of their success in attracting cyclists, like me, who might not otherwise be on the the streets at all? I understand that on several routes, LCC Camden has been able to successfully use the obvious fact that the segregated provision is full and the road besides more empty as bargaining tool to get wider lanes agreed at the cost of motor-vehicle provision.
Oh, and as you are still interested in the distance question, here are some dutch stats that further support Mark Treasure's case, but which he didn't include in the post I linked: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/12/are-your-travel-distances-and-times-too.html
Oh, and as you are still interested in the distance question, here are some dutch stats that further support Mark Treasure's case, but which he didn't include in the post I linked: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/12/are-your-travel-distances-and-times-too.html
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
I
I don't think I disagree here. I mean, the CC is a *major* factor, though I'm not sure I agree that Central London has always been a haven for cycling, having attempted it in my youth, as I said. The bomb-dodging too is probably a factor - but then it doesn't look much like a further growth strategy unless you are planning on supporting a few terrorism cells from your flat.
I don't think I disagree here. I mean, the CC is a *major* factor, though I'm not sure I agree that Central London has always been a haven for cycling, having attempted it in my youth, as I said. The bomb-dodging too is probably a factor - but then it doesn't look much like a further growth strategy unless you are planning on supporting a few terrorism cells from your flat.
you know, it pays to read the thread.
Cycling in London is increasing by 10% a year. Nobody knows where it will end, but CS7 tells us that cyclists can outnumber car drivers on major radial routes without much more than a bus lane as incentive (the blue paint came later). Still and all, cycling across the TfL area accounts for only about 2.4% of all journeys, albeit that 2.4% is greatly skewed toward zones 1 and 2. Then again, CS7, which has a capacity vastly greater than the Dumbass Lane, is nearing capacity. And that's the rub.............
21% of all journeys in the TfL area are by bus. Ken's great legacy. If I were a transport planner, charged with making London a nicer, healthier city, I'd be knocking back the private car and freeing up road space for buses and commercial vehicles. Bicycles are now a considerable hindrance to bus travel on CS7, and, again, if I were a transport planner I'd be thinking 'you know what........10% growth on next to no money (we'll forget the two hundred million spunked on LCN+)......just let them be'.
Cycling is the one of the lights of my life, but I genuinely can't see the merit in tearing up London, spending billions on routes that nobody uses, for a result that affords no benefit whatsoever to the city, when you can have 10% growth pretty much for free.
Cycling in London is increasing by 10% a year. Nobody knows where it will end, but CS7 tells us that cyclists can outnumber car drivers on major radial routes without much more than a bus lane as incentive (the blue paint came later). Still and all, cycling across the TfL area accounts for only about 2.4% of all journeys, albeit that 2.4% is greatly skewed toward zones 1 and 2. Then again, CS7, which has a capacity vastly greater than the Dumbass Lane, is nearing capacity. And that's the rub.............
21% of all journeys in the TfL area are by bus. Ken's great legacy. If I were a transport planner, charged with making London a nicer, healthier city, I'd be knocking back the private car and freeing up road space for buses and commercial vehicles. Bicycles are now a considerable hindrance to bus travel on CS7, and, again, if I were a transport planner I'd be thinking 'you know what........10% growth on next to no money (we'll forget the two hundred million spunked on LCN+)......just let them be'.
Cycling is the one of the lights of my life, but I genuinely can't see the merit in tearing up London, spending billions on routes that nobody uses, for a result that affords no benefit whatsoever to the city, when you can have 10% growth pretty much for free.
ah - the view from afar........or from the past. Was this when you were working for MI6andthreequarters?
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knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
It's a clear credo. And it looks like trade-goods, so I'll offer mine in bits for you to reassemble at will......
(The authority of MI6&3/4 doesn't stand behind any of what follows, except in the shadows, doing sums and flicking rolled up bits of paper on which coded insults are written).
I couldn't agree more about the knocking back the private car. In my view, this is as much an issue about junction design and light timings, as it is about parking, congestion charging and the like. Westminster is case in point. Running a car there has perhaps become more expensive with the CC and so forth, but this is not much of an issue for those that actually run cars in Westminster, and there's a widespread attitude that keeping the poor off the roads makes things more convenient for Bentleys. To tackle the car in Westminster they'd have to do something like Hackney with filtered access, or Camden with segregated provision. At the moment their idea about the new cycle network is to make the bike-routes go the long way and keep the direct routes for Range-Rovers.
You correctly identify that Busses and cycles massively hinder each other: stop-start accelerations of the G-forces modern busses are capable of are not what most people want to be doing when they imagine getting on a bike, even if lots of current London cyclists enjoy the game and do it on fixed gear bikes for the sheer fitness training of it. Having identified that there's a Bus/Bike problem obstructing both demographic growth in cycling and the schedules of buses, next question is what to do about it? *In my view*, there's a capacity gain for both buses and bikes to be got from managing and implementing the bus-bypass correctly. But, in oder to do this in the Dutch manner I think this will involve giving up *quite large* amounts of room currently given over to the car on such strategic routes - both in traffic and parking. (A more marginal gain: if the bus stop to be bypassed occurs on a single-lane bus-route, one could quite reasonably narrow that bus lane at the stop, freeing up another half-metre or so to pedestrians or bikes.)
Yes, I think some chin stroking is going on in TfL about whether they want to invest the kind of megabucks that is needed to solve the Bus/Bike problem to Dutch standards. Yes, I think they like the 10% growth 'for free' - but I'm pretty sure they are also aware that that growth is restricted to a demographic of people who with whatever justification feel they can master the style of vehicular cycling presently necessary to safe progress. The amount of growth you can get 'for free' is capped by the reach of that demographic, and they know that. For overall Modal share around the 5% mark, they know they will have to employ a more expensive kind of cycle provision - in the sense of redistributing *space and timings* from cars to bikes, and also paying serious money to put in, to a high standard rather than standard British cock-up, things like the Dutch Bus Bypasses. And there they are scratching their chins about whether they want to. And they aren't just looking at the rational case, but seeing the whole problem through the prism of a career spent on Busses or DoT/DfT Motor traffic nonsense.
Eventually, the case for spending serious cash on the bike will be forced upon them, in just the same way that the case for the tube was forced: it will be clear than under any continuation of the status quo, all other methods of transport are at capacity. The bike is such an inherently space-efficient way of transporting people from A to B that it will sell itself to the planners. But at the moment it is pretty clear the weight of opinion on the board is behind an entirely different strategy, which simply cannot last.Their current strategy is, as you indicate, mostly about the Bus. To make the Bus strategy work without confronting the people who like to get about London in cars *other* than with the congestion charge, they've done things like alter the timings on pedestrian crossings - making it steadily less convenient and safe to be a pedestrian once you step off the bus (not that they've bothered to collect data on the connection between pedestrian KSIs and the timings on the lights). The upshot is that people get into busses, in many instances, because it is better than being run down by one. London is becoming steadily less walkable, with all the current strategy about facilitating the Bus at junctions and light timings. In my view, more people would want to get to Oxford Street if, once you got there, you weren't so likely to be run down by a bus or jostled by crowds contained by a lethal red wall. ( http://saferoxfordstreet.blogspot.co.uk ) Now in order for the Bus strategy to keep pace with London's rising population and population density, *more* buses will be needed, and even *shorter* timings will be given to pedestrians at crossings. Part of that wheeze currently is that TfL don't monitor pedestrian congestion at junctions! That's going to be politically unsustainable. Within the constraint of pedestrian crossing times already reduced below safe minima, I suspect the Bus & Traffic Light strategy is doomed. It cannot manage the required throughput in a way that facilitates pedestrianism in central London.
Some of what you say suggests sympathy for the shared space approach, in preference segregation. To some extent I'd be with you there, because paradoxically removing traffic lights designed for Busses and private cars has been shown to increase overall capacity (
View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vzDDMzq7d0
). But the Dutch, let's not forget, do have *both* segregation *and* shared space, and the principle of their use of shared space is for that for cycles and other traffic to mix usefully low speeds must be assumed. Low speeds, paradoxically, can go with increased *average* speeds and capacity. Given that this would also go with increasing the attractiveness of the roads to cyclists, it would also have the effect of introducing the large jump in capacity that goes with modal shift to bikes.
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